Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.
V.S. NAIPAULThe reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
More V.S. Naipaul Quotes
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A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.
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I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.
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But everything of value about me is in my books.
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Writing has to support itself.
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I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.
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The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.
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There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.
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In England people are very proud of being very stupid.
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Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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It is important not to trust people too much.
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If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.
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The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.
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I’ve never abandoned the novel.
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It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
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Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.
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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
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The world is always in movement.
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Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
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You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.
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In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.
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I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
V.S. NAIPAUL